|
The light of our world can be allocated because it springs
from a corporeal mass of known position, but conceive an
immaterial entity, independent of body as being of earlier nature
than all body, a nature firmly self-based or, better, without
need of base: such a principle, incorporeal, autonomous, having
no source for its rising, coming from no place, attached to no
material mass, this cannot be allotted part here and part there:
that would be to give it both a previous position and a present
attachment. Finally, anything participating in such a principle
can participate only as entirety with entirety; there can be no
allotment and no partition.
A principle attached to body might be exposed, at least by way of
accident, to such partition and so be definable as passive and
partible in view of its close relationship with the body of which
it is so to speak a state or a Form; but that which is not
inbound with body, which on the contrary body must seek, will of
necessity go utterly free of every bodily modification and
especially of the very possibility of partition which is entirely
a phenomenon of body, belonging to its very essence. As
partibility goes with body, so impartibility with the bodiless:
what partition is possible where there is no magnitude? If a
thing of magnitude participates to any degree in what has no
magnitude, it must be by a participation without division;
divisibility implies magnitude.
When we affirm unity in multiplicity, we do not mean that the
unity has become the multiples; we link the variety in the
multiples with the unity which we discern, undivided, in them;
and the unity must be understood as for ever distinct from them,
from separate item and from total; that unity remains true to
itself, remains itself, and so long as it remains itself cannot
fail within its own scope [and therefore does reach over the
multiple], yet it is not to be thought of as coextensive with the
material universe or with any member of the All; utterly outside
of the quantitative, it cannot be coextensive with anything.
Extension is of body; what is not of body, but of the opposed
order, must be kept free of extension; but where there is no
extension there is no spatial distinction, nothing of the here
and there which would end its freedom of presence. Since, then,
partition goes with place- each part occupying a place of its
own- how can the placeless be parted? The unity must remain
self-concentrated, immune from part, however much the multiple
aspire or attain to contact with it. This means that any movement
towards it is movement towards its entirety, and any
participation attained is participation in its entirety. Its
participants, then, link with it as with something
unparticipated, something never appropriated: thus only can it
remain intact within itself and within the multiples in which it
is manifested. And if it did not remain thus intact, it would
cease to be itself; any participation, then, would not be in the
object of quest but in something never quested.
|
|